skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Staying on subject - does it matter, as long as that evolved way remains a reasonable and good way to develop?

I started with Rails 2.x, and I did find it painful to transition to Rails 3.x after a few years of not using it. In the end though, I find myself really liking the decisions made for Rails 3.x. It's helped my productivity a lot.
Let me just put it this way. It's more likely that you could win using gzip. It's similar to saying it's "possible" that the target file could have contained all zeroes.

Assuming the target file is competently constructed, the chances of winning wouldn't make it a rational bet for $0.01
So Facebook and Google+ exist in _completely_ different spaces?
I know in previous studies of stress in baby lab mice, handling by lab people was used as the stress inducer. Not sure what they use for full grown lab mice.
Unintended Consequences of the iPad mini
US court to rule on ReDigi's MP3 digital music resales
Err.. you are aware of Google+ yes?
If MC Escher took photographs.
In case safari crashes and you won't be able to open it,
sudo rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari did it for me.
It's hard to comprehensively study what all competitors are doing. It's probably more than most startups can afford to allocate time for, anyway. You're right it's not impossible, but what advantage do you have making it any easier? Some blog writing about your great user-buying tactics? That's still not a great song to sing, when you could be saying, "our product is so great users just come to us"
While true, it's worth pointing out the Romans devalued their silver coins.

One day they woke up and said "The denarian will now contain X grams of silver, rather than X+N grams. Oh and btw, all those contracts we wrote that said we'd pay you 100 coins, yeah, you're getting paid in the new denomination".
> there are countless people who rely on Facebook to communicate

They can try e-mail, IM, SMS, picking up the telephone, smoke signals. Let's stop pretending Facebook is so ingrained in people's lives that they cannot live without it. We're talking about a website that's merely a time waster.

> a billion people log into Facebook every month

I'd bet that number is way off once you account for spam profiles and how Facebook defines 'active' [1]

Edit: to satisfy ghost downvoters (HN, go figure) here is previous discussion on the billion users

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611734
In other words, this guy wants you to submit nude photos to his nude photo collector, so he doesn't have to go looking for porno on his own.

All under the thinly veiled guise of testing out an algorithm... Brilliant
Somebody please enlighten me. Is it that hard to find a pattern (for example fibonacci) that only has zeros up to F100, then remove those zeros?

You dont have to start from the first bit, you can start from bit 11234 (information on the decompiler).

So for example I skip 11134, then run +F(i) bits to the right and add a zero, then run +F(i + 1) bits to the right and add a new zero.. etc etc. The pattern has to be just long enough to cover the decompiler's size, which shouldn't be too much if scripting is allowed!

I believe that discovery of such a pattern shouldn't be too hard in a single file, arbitrary large (but 3mb should be enough too)
no need to pan panning
All ideas are old ideas
Why can't you tell us the name of the airport? Is who works on baggage tracking systems a big secret?
"There is little value in most FB posts that are years old. As opposed to wikipedia which is a gradually building blob of knowledge."

actually never thought of it so simply like this, thanks for that,
> The attention paid to each line decreases exponentially as you continue.

Man, with that writing style ... absolutely!

Or maybe I'm just writing a comment that is intentionally long to prove my point that people don't read comments, which are long and very obviously without much more content.

Here I am admiting that this comment is longer than it needs be because I'm lazy and trying to prove a point which was marginally hinted at by the parent comment, which was also an example of a comment that is too long for its own good, albeit that one was trying to prove a different point.

No there is no punchline, I am just trying to show that writing in an overly baroque style and often repeating fluff phrases that don't really mean anything or add any new information is useless ... again, there is no punchline. This whole comment is a punchline.

See?
Ask HN: I received an offer. Should I sell?
Hello HN.

I received an offer for one of the websites that I own. I'm going to keep the domain private for now for a couple reasons.

1) The site hasn't been sold yet
2) I don't want it to look like I'm simply promoting my site

Here's the story. I run a website that takes literally 5 minutes a year to keep updated. It's a simple one-page html/css site. It is ranked #1 overall on Google for a term that is searched nearly 20,000 times each month.

I've really only had the site up now for 2-3 months despite owning the domain for a year. Since the site has been up it has received over 60,000 page views from 55,000 visitors. This is all from organic search engine traffic... no advertising. In this same time the site has also earned $193 from AdSense.

Here's the stats for September and October so far:

September: 33,450 pageviews - $73.12
October (5 days): 18,667 pageviews - $13.07

Some potentially negative things about the site: contains a trademarked name in the domain. There are plenty of other sites on the internet with it in their domain as well and they are up and operating just fine. The site may only receive this much attention for 8 or 9 months out of the year.

So my question is this... should I sell the site? I was offered $400 (seems sort of low to me). Is the site worth more than that knowing it might be a seasonal(ish) site with potential trademark troubles in the name? Keep in mind the site costs literally nothing to keep up and takes 5 minutes each year to keep updated and accurate.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this!

If you want additional info I'd love to chat at draftpulse [at] gmail [dot] com or in the comments here.
Oh, that's somewhat reassuring. I'll surely benefit from it in 10 years time. :/
Or if you want to measure the speed of the source itself:

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=1M count=100
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 0.0237114 s, 4.4 GB/s

$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null bs=1M count=100
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 21.501 s, 4.9 MB/s

Also dammit Ubuntu with your Gibis.
I'm not sure if your analogy is fair.

1) Comparing two similar CSS frameworks is different from comparing two very different classes of automobiles that are visually different enough to figure out in less than a second.

2) Not many non-designers look at, let alone even experiment, with enough CSS frameworks for this to be a simple and trivial choice.
If you were able to trim just 1 byte of an arbitrary file by running it through a compressor, then you could reduce any file to a single byte by repeatedly running it through the same compressor. Clearly, that's not possible.
New API aims to help developers of multiprocessor systems
> that way of looking at things ignores the fact that constant, wild fluctuations in the value of currency

Yup, the best kind of gambling the kind where you rig the game so you always win. There's nothing worse than pesky fluctuations to impede constant winning.

Next thing we'll change the free market to guarantee goods can always be sold for a certain price, irrelevant of demand.. oh hang on.
There is literally nothing in the article that suggests that the author is trying to approximate the lifestyle of 'how poor people live'.
Would you describe your product as vapid though? Can't be that bad if people are paying you for it.
Are you fine with the whole world seeing all you email and chat history, then?
Completely doable; even in a smaller vehicle. I spent the second half of grad school living in a Hyundai Elantra - take out the back seats, sleeping between the trunk and the back seat. Not the most comfortable living, but completely doable.

Mostly, the flexibility and minimalism appealed to me, the $ savings were a secondary benefit (and weren't that beneficial, as food costs go up without a refrigerator).
Why would a stranger give me 10 million pounds?
That is why I'm building nuuton. If I'm about to get lucky, then I better aim high. Thanks for the nice words.
The problem with stop words is that they tend to be the most common words in every piece of text[1], regardless genre.

So, in order to test the hypothesis "Silmarillion is harder to read because it has lots of stop words", you need to calculate the relative frequencies of lots of other texts and see if there's something special about Silmarillion's top 10 versus all other's.

Surely, you have already done that using LOTR and The_Hobbit, but a much bigger sample is needed. At the very least, you may want to use 10-15 other works of fantasy from different authors, and that will be just like a back-of-the-envelop test to see if it is worth to pursue this experiment with a statistically significant sample.

[edit]
1. Provided it is sufficiently large.
Fictional in the sense that I work my whole life and have say $500k. Someones else works their whole life and has say $750k. Some banks make some bad decisions, lose a bunch of money, then go and print a few trillion dollars so they come out ahead.

These dollars we speak of truly must be fictional if some people have to work their entire lives to get 500 000 of them, while others can just "make" trillions on a whim to avoid having negative dollars.
The primary use case is identity fraud in financial transactions, software distribution, or in private communications.

For example, PGP v4 Key IDs are a subset of PGP v4 Key Fingerprints. PGP v4 Key Fingerprints are SHA1 hashes of some protocol information and the key material (for more detailed information see RFC4880 section 12.2). So, a proper collision, with other properly constructed packets, could yield two seemingly "identical" keys. Therefor, they may be able to produce a fake PGP key that you think belongs to a person you trust and want to communicate privately with but actually does not.

Hash function collisions can be similarly exploited with digital certificate protocols (like SSL web certs). So, a crime syndicate may be able (depending upon how badly certain hash functions are broken) to produce a fake SSL certificate for your bank's website that your browser thinks in valid. Or even worse, they may be able to produce a fake root CA singing certificate that your browser thinks is valid.

It's more complex than just "can compute hash collisions = fake certs" because there's a very limited amount of information hashed in both certs and PGP keys. The more data that is hashed the easier it is to find a collision. With PGP much of the data has to be very specific like version and algorithm designation flags and valid cryptographic values for the algorithm designated. It's safe to say "very limited flexible data = very difficult to find a collision".

Therefor, these calculations are interesting and do suggest that everyone should move away from using SHA1. But, the calculations to determine when a criminal or an anti-sec use case would be possible are much more complex and involve many more variables.
I'm not in your country. My country does not live in fear. I'm not terrified.
How about monitoring the compressor itself and not it's output? Maybe a hall-effect sensor attached to the outside of the unit could work?
I think that Henry Ford is a really good comparison. I admire Henry Ford. He was a true innovator. He was everything an entrepreneur should strive to be.

Yet he was also incredibly flawed. His shortcomings are well documented. I still admire, and attempt to emulate, Henry Ford the entrepreneur even if I don't love the man as a whole.

In the same way I admire Apple (and their embodiment in Steve Jovs) for what they've done, and in many ways emulate their approach and passion for making delightful products. Yet I'm wary, and extremely critical, of much of what they're doing.

I can definitely be both. I want to promote the Apple that makes amazing products, while quashing the Apple that wants to exert utter control over everything.
Are chairs like Facebook?
Could be just preference or even skills (my front end skills aren't that great), but I find many generic design templates to be not that great visually or a lot of work to adapt to a css framework like foundation. Time is expensive.

I like stuff with batteries included. Given bootstrap's momentum, it even has a plethora of design templates as well so you won't have a generic bootstrap looking site.
“Social Advertising”: Two guys from Philly threaten to disrupt Advertising space
Can we stop this already?

No we can't.

Imagine yourself going back to the 80s and explaining the Web to someone. It's as close to utopia as you can get. Most people probably wouldn't believe it. But it's real, it's here and it's amazing.

I'd argue that Facebook undermines a lot of what makes the Web great. And since it's being confused with the Web itself, by being so popular and pervasively devouring, it could be a treat to it.

Us nerds have failed, for whatever reason, to provide a decent competitive way to share stuff that's more aligned with the ethos of the Web. But that's not a reason to excuse Facebook.

But I disagree no one would give a shit if Facebook went away tomorrow. I for one would throw a big fucking party.
1000 APIs, 1000 Thank you
You are welcome to try! This really is an application of number theory, and the likelihood of there being a sufficiently long pattern in truly random data is actually pretty slow.
Very cool. Pixels aside, even. Very visually interesting art.
Taskbox - Mail Could Become A Worthy Sparrow Alternative
I'm not much of a car guy, why are oil changes on exotics so much more expensive than on your average car?
+100. Facebook has reinvented the AOL keyword from the outside in. Even major brands that can afford to spend big money on their web sites mention the Facebook url in their promotions. Twitter too, but they haven't done as much to let brands to customize their pages.
It's hard to tell what premise you are arguing for. Are you trying to claim that the system I outlined is not really less coupled? Or are you trying to claim that being less coupled does not really lead to less coupling?

"All your proposal does is give the system a few more sources of instability, IMO."

Actually no, the one with a few guys with their hands on the levers, and that is also politically controlled and influenced, is far less stable than one where you are free to choose what is a best form of hedging for you.
Show HN: We're making covers for stability balls. Supplement your standing desk.
> zoom into forever like some of the Escher works is interesting.

Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=x...
Actually it is an early 2008 1-series so similar timing but I think the key is to try the particular version as there is some variety (and I'm not sure it is all progress over time).
Firefox Metro Preview for Windows 8
That's not the purpose of the anecdote. He was contrasting some of the negatives of his old lifestyle with the advantages of his new one. It's not an attempt to sum up himself as a person, let alone impress an employer.
You will be happy to know that the site mentioned in the article is still available: http://web.archive.org/web/19961227054127/http://ghg.ecn.pur...
No support for foreign characters in Tags.

Created the tag, clicked on the tag, Internal server error and Asian Characters in the URL.

Also a bug report form would be great.
I passed on the original X1 for the 13" Air when I bought a new machine last year; mainly because of the display resolution. The Carbon thankfully fixed that; it's definitely back to the top of my list next time I need a new machine.
Any risk of being totally banned from the states after getting rejected with a TN too many times?
The $210,000 cow-milking robot
I'm so sorry you had to suffer under these postings.
$193 in 3 months equates to about 65 a month. In a year, you will net about $772. Conclusion, there is no point in selling it for an amount less than $772, especially given that maintenance only takes 5 minutes of your time in year. I'd probably wouldn't sell it for twice that amount - I tend to be attached to my domain names. Anyhow, think of it as beer money.
So if the President decided he wanted to build a mansion on Mars, and printed enough trillions of US dollars to achieve this, it wouldn't be theft?
Mockfs: A simple mock filesystem for unit tests (Python)
About 30 minutes ago, I tried the Starbucks app to pay for coffee. I keep seeing all cool dudes (in SoHo starbux) take out their shiny phones to point & pay. So I gave it a try today and it definitely was not a better experience (may be worse) than just handing over my credit card. Below are specifics:

1. While standing in line, I searched the app and had it on, but the phone kept turning auto-off till my turn (I re-opened it 3 times atleast)

2. The app would not scan as the screen brightness was low. I frantically went to settings to change brightness then re-trying and all this time there were people standing behind me pissed.

I think using phones as "keys" or "payment cards" is not the best interface. Ideally there should be a separate device (like a credit card) to do payments and a "Key" device to open all my locks.
http://www.tagxt.com/user/chrickso/settings

Internal Server Error
A Phone-Controlled Lock That’s Good Enough, Instead Of Perfect
Does the "commercial instance of MySQL" refer to Percona, something else, or is it simply the MySQL commercial license?
Who you invite to a meeting is just as important as who you leave out
They should take usability advice from people who think they need to use Javascript to display some static text and images?
SQLite does not have very many execution methods or a very intelligent optimizer, and every database has different access methods available to it to some extent. For example, Postgres lacks skip scan, which Oracle has. MySQL lacks bitmap index scans to combine indexes, which Postgres and Oracle have. Postgres (until the recently released 9.2) lacked index-only scan, which MySQL and Oracle (and DB2, and Informix, and SQL server...that was a feature long in coming) have. MySQL of many versions lacked hash joins (which blows my mind), it may have it now (depends how you count the forks).

So, all in all...somewhat expected. I have a number of queries that simply cannot run in their most naive rendering on Postgres due to lack of skip scan.
3Gear SDK Demo: Add gestures to your applications (video)
completely off topic, but isnt renting out what is essentially a leased apartment against most lease agreements?
The point is: do we actually care?
Free minutes aren’t. Unlimited data isn’t.
Thanks for your input! I did think $400 was a bit low. Since selling isn't necessary right now (it's doing just fine without any work right now) I was thinking $1,000 would be the magical number.
SDN is Setting The Enterprise Tech World On Fire
HN is getting more and more meta.
No, I'm talking about the same thing Matt is. Notice how, in his sign analysis example, the analyzer can return {-, 0, +}, indicating that it doesn't know the sign of some particular value. Thus, it's not an algorithm for determining the signs of values computed by an arbitrary program; it's only a heuristic that will sometimes tell you the sign. (And I don't mean "sometimes" probabilistically -- I mean "for some expressions in some programs". Given a particular expression in a particular program, it's deterministic.)

The art of static analysis, then, is to design heuristics that provide useful information in enough cases to be of practical value.
Good luck, Cringely. Can't imagine any realistic and high probablility mission that cheap wouldn't already be funded, but what do I know.
How To Use IndexedDB – Simple(st) Example
How to use indexedDB with an easy (and real world) example.
A hashtable doesn't have methods. In a dynamically typed language, I can generate object methods based on the data currently available in the database (either columns or even row content) and take advantage of all the language's syntactic features while doing that.

In respect to any language, the database is inherently dynamic, because it doesn't share your type system and the schema can be redefined at any point after compilation of your code. A statically typed language doesn't magically change that. The best you can do is to write some classes in advance and then hope nothing gets out of sync.

So, to put it in simpler terms, some things are inherently dynamic, and dynamic languages make working with them easier.
I believe the pigeon hole principle does not realy apply here, since we are looking for an algorithm that encodes just one file. For example, if we have two programs and input: ( C, n) and ( D, n) which can both be encoded in n-1 bits and ( C, n) maps into the set of n bit strings with a leading 0 and ( D, n) into the set of strings with leading 1, then counting the number of bits, I end at 2^n-1 possible states for both the programs and the output. Effectively one bit is hidden in the choice of C or D.
How to Persuade Your Boss to Fund Your Business Idea
He said he would accept multiple files; he did not however agree to change the rules of the game, which unambiguously required "a decompressor and a compressed file."

A compressed file, as in a single file, which has been compressed.

Patrick returned roughly 200 files, none of which were compressed. Thus, he did not complete the challenge, technically or legally.

EDIT: This is the crucial part: the files were not compressed by gzip. They were merely collected into a single archive (no compression), and some of the data from each file was moved into the file's name (no compression). IOW, the archive size of each chunk of data was the same as the filesystem size.
None of those are good for passive communication. No one said they "can't live without it." But it certainly adds value to a lot of people's lives.
Gold was used because it's:

1) relatively hard to counterfeit
2) scarce enough that carrying enough in your pocket to equate to significant value is convenient
3) Durable
4) Fungible
5) The supply generally expanded at a slow and predictable rate (this wasn't always the case -- the Spanish conquests, e.g., set off a devastating round of inflation when all that gold got shipped back home).

Silver and copper were also widely used.

Platinum-group metals would work, but weren't widely known to the ancients.

Crude oil: bulky and volatile.
Helium: same as crude oil, but even more so (you'd need to haul around pressure tanks)
Land: not portable. Not easily fungible.
Drinking water: bulky.

Gold was a pragmatic choice.

In some of James Blish's SF stories, they used semiconductor-grade metals.
Ken Perlin has done some interesting work on the subject: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/experiments/demox/Planet.html

It is a render of a randomly-seeded "Earth" that supports zooming. You can zoom in continuously to recursively expanding island formations. The formations are not random, in the sense that they are not decided on the fly. They are fixed based on the original seed and will stay the same if you come back to the same location. So the trick resembles displaying a map that takes up a huge amount of memory, even though that isn't really the case. As I recall the limits of the zoom have something to do with the width of floating point.

Apologies to Ken if I inaccurately described his demo. He usually makes the source available for download but I don't see how to get it here.
Perhaps he was a song away.

But not that song.
Here it is on repeat :)
http://www.listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=xTsUAdoqq8I
Stricter iPhone 5 quality standards bring worker strike at Foxconn plant
A Very Good Introduction To Computer Science and Computer Programming
Or even worse, spent the whole day dealing with bureaucracy and mundanity and meetings and crisis management... Forget about getting any actual work done.